Elizabeth Laird

About Author

Elizabeth Laird was born in Wellington, New Zealand, but is of Scottish descent and was educated at Croydon High School. She spent a year teaching in Malaysia, before studying languages at Bristol and Edinburgh universities.

Liz has spent much of her life living and working abroad, including long spells in Ethiopia and India. She now lives in Richmond with her husband, David McDowall, a writer on Middle Eastern Affairs.

Elizabeth has published many books for all ages and has won many awards, including the Children's Book Award for Kiss the Dust, the Smarties Young Judges Award, and the Lancashire Book Award. Her novel, Red Sky in the Morning was highly commended for the Carnegie Medal.

For Macmillan Children's Books, Elizabeth has published Jake's Tower, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award; The Garbage King, which won the Scottish Arts Council Book Prize, as well as being shortlisted for a number of awards including the Carnegie Medal, the Blue Peter Children's Book Awards and the Askews Torchlight Children's Book Award; A Little Piece of Ground, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the Calderdale Children's Book of the Year Award and the Sheffield Children's Book Award. Paradise End was published in 2004 and has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2004.

Interview

WELCOME TO NOWHERE

MACMILLAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS

JANUARY 2017

ELIZABETH LAIRD is no stranger to conflict and the damage inflicted on civilians by warfare and her latest novel, WELCOME TO NOWHERE, follows a family caught up in the war in Syria.

Her earlier novels including Kiss the Dust and Oranges in No Man's Land explore how war affects civilians in regional conflicts. In Welcome to Nowhere, a powerfully understated story, she also reminds us that the Syrian refugees, so often perceived as numbers and statistics, are people like us; ordinary people with families, hopes and needs.

Welcome to Nowhere follows Omar and his brother Musa, who has cerebral palsy, as they and their family are forced to flee their home and other safe havens until they find themselves living as refugees in Za'atari, an overcrowded refugee camp in Jordan. Jordan is now home to one million Syrian refugees and sales of the hardback of Welcome to Nowhere will help support refugee schools in that country.

We asked Elizabeth Laird to tell us more about WELCOME TO NOWHERE.

Q: What prompted you to explore the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis?

A: I happened to be in Germany, in Bavaria, at the end of 2015 and went to the train station in Munich when the refugees from Syria were arriving. The station was very busy as it was the end of the Beerfest but, through the crowds, you could see weary people from Syria, Eritrea and other regions who were being huddled past these signs made by children saying 'Welcome' in German.

So on this German platform, at 9pm at night, I was watching a train coming from the East full of refugees and my heart stopped. I thought that this was the story of our time.

But when I got home and tried to write the story, I couldn't. I couldn't get my head around it, I knew this wasn't the real story and I decided I needed to go to the Middle East to find it. I asked around and was offered a place helping on a course for teachers in two camps on how to write stories for older children.

I had two weeks there to learn about the refugee camp and I visited a refugee family who were living outside the camp. They were so charming but their stories were heart-rending. I also visited a school in the desert area to the north that is being supported by Helping Refugess in Jordan, a British-based organisation that is providing hands-on aid work, and I decided to do what I could to help raise funds for this initiative, via the Mandala Trust in the UK.

Q: How can people find out more about the trust and its work?

A: There is information about the Mandala Trust at the back of copies of Welcome to Nowhere and an explanation about how sales of the hardback will help raise funds for the Hope School near Amman and another school for refugees in the north of Jordan.

We are doing what we can to support their work and I do hope that people will want to find out more about how they can help once they have read the book. They can also visit my website, www.elizabethlaird.co.uk.

There is a rising tide of Islamophobia and anti-refugee sentiment because people in the West see refugees as numbers, not as people who are scared and fearful. Once you understand that they are individuals escaping a war, you feel differently about them. In Welcome to Nowhere, Omar and Musa are lovely, lively young boys and their religion is about a community, a network of neighbours and support.

Q: When is the novel actually set?

A: The book is set in 2012, before Isis had started to make its gains and wasn't yet in northern Syria. The book describes how the civil war started, with school boys writing slogans on the walls of their schools and being arrested and tortured for that, although that happened in early 2011.

I felt that I needed to know as much as I could about the setting before I started writing it, which is why I visted the camps. For the earlier part of the novel, when the war begins, I had lived in Beirut during the civil war in the '70s, so I know what it's like having bombs go off on the road in front of your house.

Q: Were Omar and his family, your main characters, inspired by anyone you met in Syria?

A: The family we met outside the camp were wonderful and inspired the family in the book, although they were also very different. One of their children did have cerebal palsy which probably helped inspire my character Musa, Omar's brother. I also met some really naughty children in a playground in one of the desert schools who were definitely the inspiration for the 'Hooligans' in the refugee camp in Welcome to Nowhere.

I also met a wonderful Syrian lecturer at Edinburgh University and she gave me lots of tips about family life in Bosra, what kind of furniture they might have etc.

Q: You explore the role of women in this story and the question of early arranged marriages of teenage girls. Why does that become such an important part of the novel?

A: The question of women's rights being suppressed doesn't just happen in the Middle East, it is happening in this country, too; it's happening around the world.

But you do see in the Lebanon, in Palestine, in Pakistan and Malaysia, you see women have in subtle ways started to question this. They are taking on roles and quietly doing things and creating change.

One of the really difficult things about the whole conflict in Syria is that so many women have lost their husbands and they are having to get on and do what their husbands would once have done - but they are doing it.

Having explored this, I felt I couldn't then shy away from the question of early arranged marriage in this story and the issue comes up for Omar's older sister, Eman, when their father arranges a marriage for her. I wanted to show why her father wants her to have what they see as a terrible marriage but which he believes will help to keep his family safe.

Q: Towards the end of the story, there is the possibility that Omar and his family will come to Britain and Omar asks, 'Do you think they'll like us?'. Are you hopeful for the future of this family in Britain?

A: I don't know how Omar's family will get on in Britain and I have thrown that question open. I imagined a class reading the book and, when they come to that question, having to think, 'What would we do if there was a refugee in our class? How would we treat them?'. So that is a question for the reader.

In a way it's an unrealistic ending for the book since so few Syrian refugees have come to Britain but I am hopeful, after speaking to people who work in this field, that the family would be brought to the UK because of their circumstances; we discover that one of the children needs a life-saving operation. I understand that people in the field would do their best to have the family brought here.

Q: What are you writing now?

A: I finished writing Welcome to Nowhere last June, it only took me six months to write it once I had decided on the story, but I haven't started on a new novel yet as I've been fundraising since then for the Mandala Trust to support the refugee schools in Syria. A 50p donation from every hardback sold will go to the Trust, and I am doing talks about Syria with my husband.

However, I am going to back to Beirut in Lebanon at Christmas and I'll have a little look around when I am there. Maybe there is another story waiting for me...

DINDY AND THE ELEPHANT

MACMILLAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS

JUNE 2015

Acclaimed writer Elizabeth Laird takes us to India in 1947, a turbulent time when Colonial rule was coming to an end. Dindy, born and raised in India, has grown up in a tea garden, or plantation, but has rarely set foot outside the estate's home. One afternoon she risks leaving home with her younger brother, Pog, in search of adventure but when they are snubbed by the local children and terrified by a rogue elephant, Dindy realises that the India she knows is very different from the real India. But it is still her home and Dindy is devastated when she discovers that her parents are planning to return to England.

We spoke to Elizabeth Laird about Dindy and the Elephant, her life of travel, and writing:

Q: You've written about many countries, especially Ethiopia, so what encouraged you to write a book set in India and is that somewhere you have also visited?

A: I spent two fascinating periods in India during the '70s, working as a lecturer in linguistics and phonetics and I loved it. It was also where I met my husband, I was on an aeroplane flying from Bombay to Bhopal and it was a very bumpy flight and I was quite ill, and the person sitting next to me was very kind to me and he turned out to be my future husband. So India has a very special place in my life.

We've got lots of objects from India around our house so I already felt an affinity with India because both my maternal grandfathers were born in India. One of their families had a tea garden in the 1840s and 1850s, in Assam, but it went bust because the bank where they had their money failed and he had to sell the tea garden.

As a child I saw the deeds of the sale and in the deeds I saw that four elephants were part of the estate and it seemed so romantic to me then and I wanted to know more about them. So it was a family story from 150 years ago that began this one.

A couple of years ago my husband and I had to travel to Saudi Arabia to visit our son and the cheapest way to do so was to fly via Kerala and so we broke our journey to spend a wonderful fortnight in Kerala. It was the first time I'd been back to India for 40 years and while we were there, I wanted to go to a tea garden. We stayed in this astonishing bungalow filled with colonial furnishings and with beautiful gardens. Lots of wealthy Indians like to go to these places to stay when it gets very hot but at that time of year we were the only ones there.

The manager of the bungalow looked after us and took us for a walk in the gardens. It was cool and pleasant in the highlands and we could hear the hymns coming from the Hindu temples in the valley below so it felt very magical. He told us that a rogue elephant had come out of the forest into the tea plantation, so there were no workers there that day. We went to see the tame working elephants, though, down by the river and learned about the Mahouts, who were often from the hill tribes and who had a very special relationship with the elephants. We were told one story about a Mahout who had coaxed a rogue elephant back into the forest. I put all of this together and got Dindy and the Elephant.

Q: Why have you set the book in 1947?

A: I chose that year because it was a time when huge changes were beginning to emerge in India. That's when the imperialist period in India is coming to an end and because of that, I could give a voice to the children by the river.

Dindy's father isn't a bad man, he just reflects how people thought and behaved at that time. Dindy is how she is because I needed a child who wanted to break free of their house, which was a kind of prison, and her brother needed to express the views of his parents. Once I start writing my characters, they do become very real and want to do their own thing, and I have to let them do it.

Q: Through Dindy and her family, you explore the racial tensions of the time. Have your own perceptions changed as a result of the travelling you have done during our life?

A: My first job in 1962 was in Malaysia where I taught in a girls' school and where I was the only European person at the school. The only other white people in the area were the army officers and some rubber planters and there was a club where all the ex-pats went. I was only 18 and I remember the very startled expressions from the ex-pats when they saw me out shopping with my Malaysian friends, because they kept themselves so separate. I saw the very clear distinction between my friends and the white people.

I am a bit obsessed about racism, partly because I spent that amazing year with my Malaysian friends which changed how I thought. I had been brought up with this superior attitude of the white woman in the 1960s, so it was a wake up call for me.

Racism and how we look at people from a different race is one of the most important things of our time and it is so important that we get over it and stop looking at people from other races the way we do; white people still feel this unjustified sense of superiority.

A friend of mine once told me, 'you British feel you can go to any part of the world and travel to any country and look at everything; other people don't see it like that, they don't make that assumption'. Even after all these years, we do still feel we can go anywhere, ask questions, take pictures.

Q: Why do you enjoy writing about other cultures and setting your stories outside more familiar landscapes?

A: When we came to live in England from New Zealand, my whole family felt foreign and we felt that we weren't like everyone else. We didn't know how to work the whole British class system and we called things by different names and we felt apart. Although I was very young when we came, that coloured my childhood.

I didn't feel that we really belonged there, and so I travelled and I've had the most intense experiences of my life in places like Ethiopia, Pakistan, India etc, there are so many children living lives in these places that are full of adventure.

Although some children in this country do have sadly dramatic lives, for most children their lives are very circumscribed and it's hard to give them adventures that are outside the home and away from computers. But in the rest of the world, children are out in the streets having to do the kinds of grown up stuff that we used to do in my generation, going out alone and doing things. Unless you go into fantasy or you move into really dark stories, I'm not sure I could construct a plot out of children's lives today.

Q: In your story, Dindy and her little brother are threatened by a rogue elephant. Is that an experience you've ever had?

A: I do very much draw from my own experiences and feelings when I am writing. I may never have been charged by an elephant but when I was researching 'Wild Things', which was ten adventure stories set in Africa, our Land Rover was charged by a rhino. The driver managed to get us away safely but if he hadn't, there's no doubt the rhino would have turned the Land Rover over and it was very frightening. I could draw on my feelings about that when I was writing about Dindy's experience with the elephant.

Q: What is it about India that 'speaks' to you?

A: India is such a thrilling country, everybody is so open with you and they are wonderfully upfront and funny and amusing, so when you're there you have lovely encounters with all sorts of different people.

I find the Hindu religion riveting and the temples and statutes are amazing. It's a fascinating culture and a very beautiful country.

There are also some blindingly good Indian writers who have not yet been discovered or published in Europe.

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